The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through the Cities at the Heart of Europe

This is in many ways a book about the history which history forgot. In it, the cities of central and eastern Europe come alive with a cornucopia of intriguing facts and fascinating anecdotes. Graveyards and ghettoes, ancient and modern ruins, old town halls and old town squares, all are resurrected in the pages of this delightful and original work. We have George Eliot’s description of the Jewish cemetery in Prague, which miraculously remains much the same today, with its gravestones ‘standing at rakish angles’. The Polish poet who called himself Or-Ot writes lyrical verse intended to preserve the Old Town tenements of Warsaw from gentrification. And the Nobel prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz looks back from his old age in California to the ‘oddity’ of the Lublin where he grew up between two world wars amidst ‘narrow cobblestone streets and an orgy of barque…neither a provincial nor a capital city, although it was provincial above all’. This may be said of many of the cities which Kohn describes in such intriguing detail. But Kohn’s is no blinkered vision, confined to the mythical, the picturesque and the picaresque. Although the cities he describes contain all of these elements, so many of them were flattened by the allied bombing of the Second World War (as well as the ravages of previous wars).  Some have been rebuilt as facsimiles of their past . A few, such as Frankfurt, have also sprouted skyscrapers of glass. But as I know from my own experience, one can still dine on authentic Frankfurt green sauce in a resurrected old street which stands in the shadows of these gleaming modern megaliths. And one can still visit the old Goethe House, painstakingly rebuilt with money donated by writers such as André Gide and Thornton Wilder. Amongst the many dignitaries who attended the opening ceremony of the Goethehaus was John J McCloy, former chairman of the World Bank, whose actions during the Second World War saved Rothenburg an der Tauber, which remains to this day as if preserved in aspic. In medieval times, Rothenburg an der Taber straddled one of the main trading rotes between eastern and western Europe, accumulating riches, and becoming one of the most flourishing locations in the German-speaking world, attracting pilgrims and merchants alike, all contribuiting to its concentration of wealth, and the fine high-roofed half-timbered houses which overlooked its cobbled streets. Then came the Thirty Years War, which ravaged Europe, along with the bubonic plague. The trade route changed, leaving an all but deserted architectural gem. This is but one of the many gems of living history which leap from the pages of Kohn’s ever-fascinating tale of these historic cities which occupy the heart of Europe.